Pure Energy

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Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles. - Bill Gates

I am not one to beat the environmental drum, although I do agree that something should be done to halt or slow our path to global resource depletion. I think any progress that can be made in this area should be pursued. During the Reagan era, amazingly, there was a cooperative effort between the governments of the United States and Russia to create a viable fusion engine that would be able to generate electrical power on a global scale.

This post will increasingly delve into this concept as it goes on, so if you find yourself being baffled or bored, I would encourage you to skip to the conclusion. If you find it fascinating and encouraging as I did, you might want to read the brief article and watch the presentation video to understand it better. I got this from my daughter who posted this to my Google+ “wall”.

We are all familiar with the energy generated by the sun. Instead of the sun just burning hydrogen, which would have depleted the hydrogen of the sun in a few million years, the sun uses fusion. Simply put, subatomic particles are manipulated under extreme heat and pressure to convert hydrogen to helium. This process generates the energy of the sun and is the most resource efficient process known to modern science to generate energy of any kind.

In the 50’s, it was discovered that fusion could be achieved using a plasma field. Regrettably, at the time, the technology demanded enormous expense and resources in order to generate this field. Reagan and Gorbachev initiated the Tokamaks project during a summit that would create this plasma field efficiently. However, the fusion engine would have been 30 meters tall, weighed 23,000 tons, had 1 million parts and would cost $20 billion to produce. Its production on a global scale would have been prohibitive for the near future.

Lockheed Martin is developing a fusion engine that would fit on the back of a flatbed truck. It generates no hydrocarbons and is capable of an immediate shutdown in case of a stability breach of any kind. It is also incapable of being produced as a weapon. As opposed to the Tokamaks engine, it utilizes electromagnetic energy to contain the plasma field instead of a free flowing field like the Tokamaks engine. It is also viable for mass production and would be small enough for space exploration and colonization. Heat is created by radio frequency, so the resource to energy ratio would be more efficient.

Conclusion – Despite individual ranting that we live in a police state that uses its resources to horribly oppress its citizens in the United States, there is a fair amount of good that is coming out of the government. Yes, there are laws that dampen our ability to: be heavily armed, filch other people’s talents through intellectual property theft, allow predatory business entities to damage our citizens, allow the movements of those who pose a danger to others or themselves, mandate to a pregnant woman how she handles a parasitic organism within her own body, insist that our society provide our health care only because we refuse to provide it ourselves to the best of our ability

The government genuinely tries to work toward the best interest of all the people of this nation. Our government doesn't try to solve all our problems. It allows its citizens to overcome their own barriers because that's the essence of true liberty. This is one shining example of our chosen leaders moving our country and civilization forward in a manner that can’t be done on a smaller scale.

The new business frontier

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

"There's a terribly huge amount of business in Southeast Asia. That place literally reeks of money. Many people are demanding all sorts of goods and services. Whatever your mind can invent, it's worth doing business with" - that's what a very posh-looking and overly excited investor preached to me at a recent real estate show that I attended in Shanghai last week. He should've told me the rest of the story, though. Because, in order to conduct good business in East and Southeast Asia, one should find the proper formula. You can't just go there and splash a bag of cash, and hope it'll be a good start that'd work in the long run. Turns out that condition #1 is, one should have a reliable partner there, because many things would certainly require specialised knowledge that one can't possibly acquire without having an insider's expertise of the culture.

The rest of his story was true, however. Today, the so called Indochina region (Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Singapore and Thailand) is like El Dorado for investors from around the world. He specifically talked in great detail about his adventures at the emerging Cambodian market. Tons of international companies, big and small, are opening branches there. And the interest keeps growing, coupled with interest from within the local markets themselves, as the middle class in those countries continues to take shape.

( There's a lot going on in Southeast Asia these days )